Style

I once interviewed Dickie Henderson, comedian and night-club artist. He told me he would have liked to have been Sinatra because the man had great style. Dickie Henderson certainly had style himself but he mocked it in himself. I told him I admired particularly two of his "acts", one in which he played the part of a singer with a microphone with a long lead which an incompetent aide was holding and feeding him with from the side of the stage. It was a very funny sketch. The other was his famous take-off of a man, drunk, sitting on a high stool at a bar singing, Sinatra-style, "One for my baby and one more for the road." Great.
He was then getting on in years and said the first sketch was proving too physically difficult for him; he still did the other - indeed, I saw him do it at Cardiff's New Theatre.
We met in his dressing room half an hour before he was due to go on stage for the evening performance. We chatted and we drank. He had had wheeled in a trolley full from top to bottom with drinks, mostly shorts. We drank gin. Glass after glass of it. He sang a bit of a song and I joined him.
I wrote an article about it but the features editor, for reasons unknown, did not publish it.
Probably because I couldn't remember most of what we had talked about.
When I left, Dickie Henderson walked on stage, and I almost fell out of the theatre.
I was pretty sure he'd been drinking before I met him so, as they say, "he could certainly take it". When he walked on stage to do his show he strolled on with not a stagger in sight.
Style? He had it in spades.